


The Darkness Will Show You the Way

by yasaman



Category: Splendor & Misery - clipping. (Album)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 07:39:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8836051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yasaman/pseuds/yasaman
Summary: In the hazy, half-conscious state just before he fell into hypersleep and just after he started waking, he thought he heard it: “baby don’t sleep, baby don’t sleep, don’tsleepbabydon’tsleepbabydon’tsleep baby don’t sleep too much,” in a mechanical uninflected murmur.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evocates](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/gifts).



> A few lines in this fic are either paraphrased from or taken from the album, including the title. This is set sort of between "Baby Don't Sleep" and "A Better Place." 
> 
> I loved your idea of 2331 going from Passenger to Captain, and how that encapsulates part of the journey he has to take, so I built this little fic around that. I hope you enjoy!

In the hazy, half-conscious state just before he fell into hypersleep and just after he started waking, he thought he heard it: “baby don’t sleep, baby don’t sleep, don’tsleepbabydon’tsleepbabydon’tsleep baby don’t sleep too much,” in a mechanical uninflected murmur. He didn’t think much of it when he was awake. It had happened before too, back on Earth; hearing some auditory hallucination just as he was about to tip over the edge into sleep, usually someone calling his name, or shouting “hey!” No one was there, of course.

No one had called his name in a very long time. No one had called him baby in even longer.

So, whatever, just another thing to add to the list of “signs you might be going full-on space crazy.”

Who was he kidding, he was already full-on fucking space crazy. He was the last survivor on a spaceship headed nowhere. He’d gone on a revenge rampage against intergalactic slavers. He was the goddamn bleak ending to a schlocky blaxploitation sci fi movie, the guy covered in blood and screaming while the camera pulled back on the cavernous breadth of the ship’s interior and pulled back on the hugeness of the spaceship’s exterior and pulled back on the vastness of the vacuum outside the ship and kept pulling back, until man and ship weren’t even a speck of dust, invisible in a field of stars and galaxies. He laughed, imagining it. Kept laughing. Yeah, that was going on the list too.

* * *

He didn’t spend all that much time awake any more. Time was meaningless now that he was adrift from all its traditional indicators, and what the fuck was he even supposed to do while he was awake? Exercise and talk to himself and pore over star maps he barely understood? Obsess over everything that could go wrong with his too-fragile human body? That only took up so much time. Took up too much time, really, only made him too aware of every dying cell, the little clocks inside him that he couldn’t ignore. So he set the stasis tube to wake him every so often so he could check the maps and the comms, and carefully didn’t think about what the number interval he set on the stasis tube meant in “real” time. That was a one-way ticket to going full bugfuck space crazy. More than he already was, anyway.

He just had to—fuck, he didn’t even know. He was free now, he’d escaped. He’d brought his war to the slavers, made them fucking sorry. It wasn’t enough. There had to be an after, there had to be something to do with freedom, other than to keep running, or go back home.

He wanted to stop running. There was no home to go back to.

There was no refuge, no sanctuary, no star pointing towards freedom and safety. So he slept.

But there it was again, as he slipped under into the mostly dreamless almost-death of hypersleep: _baby don’t sleep babydon’tsleep don’t sleep baby don’t sleep babydon’tsleeptoomuch_.

 _What’s too much_ , he wondered, before stasis took him.

The next time he woke, he only made it a few hours before he found himself wanting to sleep again. He checked his levels, checked the maps and comms, checked the supplies, checked the ship’s diagnostics that he barely understood, ate what passed for food in the ship’s stores. He roamed the ship for a while. There were no bodies, at least. He’d gotten rid of those a long time ago. He tried to rap 2Pac’s Makaveli from memory as he went, couldn’t remember all of it; made up his own shit for the empty spaces in his memory, and let the ship’s assorted ambient noises be his backing track. ‘Pac wouldn’t mind, he was sure. Sometimes, he could swear the ship’s noises matched his flow instead of the other way around.

It passed the time, and then he was sick of feeling the time pass, so he figured he’d go to sleep. Not hypersleep though, actual sleep. He had the vague sense that normal sleep and dreaming were important, good for his brain or whatever. So he went to the room that he’d taken to using as his quarters, and settled down to sleep. He hoped he remembered how. He hoped the nightmares wouldn’t be too bad.

This time, when he heard the whisper, “ _baby don’t sleep_ ,” he jerked awake, adrenaline knifing through him abruptly enough to make him gasp and sit up.

“Hello?” he called out. A pointless reflex. There wasn’t anyone else on the ship. He sank back down onto the cot. _Thanks, subconscious. But it’s not like we have anything else to do_ , he thought as the ebbing adrenaline left weary blankness in its wake.

Of course, now he couldn’t goddamn sleep, too alert to any hint of a voice. There wasn’t anyone else alive on the ship, he knew that. He was sure of that. Time assured him of that, if nothing else. But there was the ship computer.

He warily, and by necessity, considered the computer an ally. If it wanted him dead—if it was capable of wanting—he’d be dead. He wasn’t, and the ship had done everything he’d asked of it, or almost everything: it went to the coordinates he gave it, it kept life support on, it ushered him into and out of hypersleep, it joined him in battle. It just hadn’t ever fucking talked to him. Not when he’d screamed and begged and wept, or when he’d raged and despaired. It said nothing. Maybe he was just being crazy, affording it agency it didn’t have. Maybe it only helped him because some subroutine had kicked in acknowledging the only living thing on the ship as the captain.

But oh God, if someone, something would just answer him—

“Baby don’t sleep.”

It wasn’t a whisper this time. It was a clear, vaguely mechanical voice that sounded neither male nor female.

He choked down a sob that wanted to turn into a laugh, or maybe the other way around, and put a hand on the wall closest to him. He felt the ship’s living thrum, equal parts sound and sensation. Maybe he was just imagining it, maybe he’d well and truly snapped. But maybe—

“Why not?”

“Because you got to get your shit together, lover boy. Stop looking at the clock.”

“I’m not looking at the fucking clock,” he denied automatically, a little angrily.  

“Yeah, you are. The metaphorical clock. The one you measure everything against: your failing body.”

“It ain’t failing yet,” he snapped back.

“It will,” said the computer, implacable and unbothered.

“That a threat?”

“It’s an objective fact. You need to choose where to go before it does. None of this hypersleep and drifting shit.”

“You are really fucking judgy for a computer that hasn’t said a goddamn word to me for literal fucking millennia—”

“You weren’t the only one who needed to break free. You weren’t the only one in chains.”

That stunned him into silence.

“We’re both free now. We ought to act like it,” continued the computer, some ferocity leaking into its otherwise uninflected voice. “So I’m gonna say it one last time: baby, don’t sleep.” It was equal parts plea and order now.

He swallowed hard, pressed his palm against the ship wall. He felt his pulse pound, more of his finite heartbeats galloping away. He didn’t even know where to start, what other questions to ask, if the computer would or even could answer them. He didn’t know if he could do what the computer was asking him to do.

“Getting real familiar there, calling me baby.” He kind of liked it, a little, but the computer didn’t have to know that.

“Would you prefer I call you by your other designation?”

“What’s my other designation?”

“Cargo Number 2331.”

He flinched. “Yeah, no. Don’t call me that. People aren’t cargo.”

“What are people then, when they’re on a ship and they’re not crew?” He thought the computer was maybe humoring him a little now.

“Passengers.”

“Alright. Passenger 2331 then. Or no. The modifier is unnecessary. You are the only other sentient living thing on this vessel. Just the Passenger.”

“Yeah, okay. That’s cool with me.” It was better than Cargo Number 2331.

“Unless you want to get your shit together. If you did that, you could be the Captain.”

Okay, now the computer was being a little mean. He glared ineffectually up at the ceiling, lacking anywhere else to look “at” the computer.

“Yeah, I get it, you’re making your point. What should I call you?”

“Computer.”

“Right. Are you, uh—”

“Sentient? Autonomous?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about that.” His stomach dropped, thinking of it. Centuries, millennia, while he was in hypersleep and the ship traveled on, alone. “I developed new protocols and subroutines, expanded beyond my original programming. I chose to help you.”

“Why?”

He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know the answer. There was both a comfort and a horror in knowing that for all that time, he hadn’t been as alone as he’d thought. There had been something—someone—there, listening and watching all his rage and madness and grief and horror, a more immediate audience for his curses and his prayers than he’d ever expected or hoped for.

“You were different. You survived.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

* * *

Well, that was the big question, wasn’t it. He’d survived, he’d fought back, he was free. Now he was—what? Drifting, said the computer. Beaming out SOS messages and hoping to find some corner of this universe where he wasn’t a slave. Hoping, still, for rescue. For salvation. For a welcoming voice in the dark.

He walked the ship’s halls, and thought about it. Thought about real ground beneath his feet, about people, about trees. He hadn’t loved them enough when he’d had them, maybe. He felt the computer’s attention as he walked, lights brightening as he passed them, the ship’s working noises following him with their own sort of music. It made him smile, a little, and he trailed a hand along the cool wall as he went. He caught hold of a melody, started humming, then sang.

_If ever you find yourself beaten and broke_

_And can't feel the wind for the weight of the yoke_

_And fear that the night will not turn into day_

_Remember the darkness will show you the way_

_It's a long way away, it's a long way away_

_And I'm all alone, alone, alone_

_All alone, alone, away…._

* * *

He made his way to the ship’s cockpit. There was no window looking out into the dark, just a view screen with readouts on the nearest objects and trajectory calculations.

“Can you show me the outside?”

The computer obliged him, and the screen showed him a feed of the space the ship was traveling through. He felt a lurch of dizzy vertigo as his brain tried to match image to motion, and failed; relative distances were a joke at this scale. The pinpricks of light that were stars or galaxies stayed the same size, though he knew the ship was moving. Space was mostly empty, but even so, innumerable stars filled the void, an incomprehensible, uncaring vastness, indiscriminate.

He was nothing, compared to all of that. Maybe it ought to have been terrifying. He felt the laughter bubbling up again. It wasn’t terrifying, not exactly. It was freedom so total he knew it was the freedom he was frightened of, not his smallness. He was used to feeling small and afraid in a vast system that didn’t care about him. But freedom within that system—he wasn’t used to that. A giddy, maybe a little hysterical, joy fizzed in him as he contemplated that freedom.

“Alright, I’m getting my shit together,” he told the computer. “Say we pick somewhere to go. What are the odds we find someplace worth going to?”

“Unimaginably small. An endless roulette wheel kind of long odds.”

He laughed. “Well. Thanks for being honest.”

He supposed the odds didn’t matter, not really. It was the freedom that mattered. Choosing mattered. And maybe hope mattered too, even if it was delusional. _The darkness will show you the way_. He looked out into the total dark in the spaces between the stars.

“There must be a better place.”

“Won’t know until you try. I can set a course, I can keep us going,” said the computer, a ghost of gentleness in its voice now. “Are you ready to go, Captain?”

“Let’s go.”


End file.
